Response Capture

When analyzing the sales of your business do you find that the 80/20 rule applies? 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your clients. Or 80% of your profit margin comes from 20% of your clients? Conversely, what about 80% of your expenses coming from 20% of your clients? The question becomes how do I find more of the profitable ones and avoid the ones that are driving expenses through the roof.

If your customer file is less than 1,000 records and if you have time to dedicate, we would recommend performing the modeling internally. Otherwise, run your file through D&B* to append the attributes (D&B has set up fees, so if your list is small it is more cost effective to manually research the records).

D&B offers modeling services in the US and UK. Or, a free very simple tool for US is infoUSA’s Quick Customer Cloner.

The following are 7 simple steps to help you find profitable clients.*

1. Hiring a temp or use an admin to append an SIC, employees, revenue, etc to each prospect using a tool like Hoovers* (or D&B’s IBL, which has better coverage but costs more).
2. Run some group by queries and cluster counts for each of the appended attributes to get a good sense of the characteristics. To avoid false positives, remember to group by all attributes to get an overall profile.
3. Document the characteristics from your cluster analysis.
4. Provide D&B with your characteristics and ask them to supply you with a count of how many companies fit your target criteria-simple counts are free as they want to sell you data.
5. Compare the existing size to how many you have in your prospect file-the gap are your “look like” targets.
6. Determine marketing / sales approach depending on the size, information available (phone, address, email, etc) and your existing relationship.
7. Executive a pilot campaign to a representative sample (buy only part of the universe); record the results.

If successful, buy more data and execute again. If not successful, evaluate the results and learning’s; revise and test again.

By following those 7 simple steps you’ll be able to find more profitable clients that meet your target criteria. The results will also help you avoid the clients that are more expensive to you.

*D&B provides solution sets that meet a diverse set of customer needs globally.

*The steps can be more complex depending on your objectives.

*Hoover’s, Inc. is a D&B company. They deliver insight and analysis about the companies, industries, and people that drive the economy.

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